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Half of all PaaS apps will be IoT-centric, says Gartner

More than half of all new applications developed on Platform as a Service will IoT-centric by 2020, according to new research from Gartner, who says the trend will disrupt conventional architecture practices.

The analyst firm says Platform as a Service utilisation is on the rise due the widespread adoption of the Internet of Things.

"IoT adoption will drive additional use of PaaS to implement IoT-centric business applications built around event-driven architecture and IoT data, instead of business applications built around traditional master data," explains Benoit Lheureux, research vice president at Gartner.

"New IoT-centric business applications will drive a transformation in application design practices that focus on real-time contextually rich decisions, event-analysis, lightweight workflow, and broad access to Web-scale data,” he says.

Lheureux says most new IoT-centric solutions will be implemented on IoT platforms, a form of multifunctional comprehensive PaaS that is a hybrid, architecturally coherent integration of application platform as a service (aPaaS),integration platform as a service (iPaaS), IoT device management, orchestration and business process management services as a platform (bpmPaaS), database PaaS (dbPaaS) and analytics services.

Gartner says through 2018, more than 70% of IT organisations planning a private PaaS will deploy a container service (rather than PaaS framework software).

Instead of constructing a private PaaS using a PaaS framework, many organisations adopt a container service.

An advanced container service provides subscribers with self-service access to container-based infrastructure. It hosts, orchestrates, schedules, scales and ensures the reliability of containers. It may also provide other capabilities, such as monitoring, load balancing and securing container communications.

"For advanced technical teams a container service may be better than a PaaS framework for the desired balance between developer productivity, breadth of viable application architectures, IT operations control, and the complexity of implementation," says Lydia Leong, vice president and analyst at Gartner.

"A container service is also a relatively inexpensive acquisition alternative to PaaS frameworks,” she explains.

According to Gartner, through 2018, more than 80% of organisations that deploy or assemble self-managed PaaS frameworks will not achieve the expected cloud PaaS experience.

By investing in cloud platforms, enterprise IT leaders are seeking some or all of the key benefits of cloud for their new IT initiatives, the analyst firm says.

However, in the next three years, many self-managed private PaaS initiatives will fail to meet the IT organisation leadership's expectations of cloud characteristics.

“The tension between the forces in favour of private PaaS and those demanding the full public cloud experience will intensify as self-managed private cloud disappoints. Managed private (or public) PaaS will emerge as best practices.”

"Success with a private cloud (including PaaS) requires a recognition of the essential cultural and organisational changes to IT organisations, as well as technology changes," explains Yefim V. Natis, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

"Lacking this understanding leads many organizations to stop their PaaS investment at the point of technology deployment — leading to disappointing results down the road."

By 2019, Gartner says a mandatory capability for the top five aPaaS providers will be the delivery of both high-productivity and high-control PaaS options.

“Large organisations facing a variety of requirements in the bimodal world will prefer aPaaS suites that can provide integrated high-control and high-productivity capabilities and, as such, these service providers will receive preferential treatment in the market.

“Combined capabilities will become a requirement for aPaaS market leadership.”